How the Chinese Media Shape Eileen GU in Beijing Winter Olympic: A Text Analysis of News Reports

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-276-7_47How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Media image; Eileen Gu; Chinese female athletes; Text analysis

Abstract

18-year-old Eileen Gu is the undoubted spotlight of the world with a three-medals debut in 2022 Winter Olympics. As the host country, China has crafted overwhelming media coverage towards the naturalized skier to boost national pride. This paper aims to explore the media portrayals and narratives of Gu in China through a text analysis of 341 news reports about her. It’s revealed that the Chinese media adopted a depoliticized and nationalistic narrative strategy and in the cocoon of information created by the Chinese media, controversial points surrounding her such as “dual nationality” have been selectively ignored, and she has been portrayed as a naturalized athlete passionate about traditional Chinese culture, a Gen-Z feminist with dual success in terms of academics and her sports career and a female ambassador exhibiting friendliness, modesty, and generosity to her competitors and teammates. Chinese media try to capture everything related to China in Eileen Gu’s behaviors on and off the arena, and through multiple details to continuously reinforce her self-identification and sense of belonging as a patriotic “naturalized athlete”. Gu’s family education and the impact of her mother and her grandmother as strong women in their careers are also quoted frequently as a hinted explanation for her success. Gu herself also consciously touches upon the topic of feminism and gender equality amid sports participation on public occasions, which proved to be safe and newsworthy in both America and China and fits in the media agenda well. Apart from that, the Chinese media also aim to break the stereotype of Chinese woman athletes by covering Gu’s record-breaking performance of winning 3 medals, her Olympic spirit of caring for her teammates, and her business success as an ambassador for more than 20 brands.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiahong Lin
AU  - Tianci He
AU  - Lianxiang Fan
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/10/27
TI  - How the Chinese Media Shape Eileen GU in Beijing Winter Olympic: A Text Analysis of News Reports
BT  - Proceedings of the 2023 4th International Conference on Big Data and Social Sciences (ICBDSS 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 441
EP  - 452
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-276-7_47
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-276-7_47
ID  - Lin2023
ER  -